The present disclosure relates to wireless communication, and more specifically to full bandwidth multicast indication to multiple users.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). A wireless network, for example a wireless local area network (WLAN), such as a Wi-Fi (i.e., Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11) network may include an access point (AP) that may communicate with one or more stations or mobile devices. The AP may be coupled to a network, such as the Internet, and may enable a mobile device to communicate via the network (or communicate with other devices coupled to the access point). A wireless device may communicate with a network device bi-directionally. For example, in a WLAN, a station may communicate with an associated AP via downlink (DL) and uplink (UL). The DL (or forward link) may refer to the communication link from the AP to the station, and the UL (or reverse link) may refer to the communication link from the station to the AP.
In some cases, an AP may send a single transmission to multiple stations within a WLAN. For example, data packets may be multicast to a number of stations, where each station decodes the same information. Current WLAN preamble designs used for transmitting frames to multiple users in a WLAN may limit the ability of APs to communicate with multiple stations, especially for a large number of stations that are to receive a multicast transmission. Being constrained to transmit to a limited or small number of stations may result in performance degradation of the WLAN. For example, throughput may be low in cases where an AP is serving a large number of stations and the AP is unable to transmit to all of the stations to which it would like to send a multicast transmission. In addition, larger WLAN preambles may be undesirable because increasing the size of the preamble may increase the total overhead for a transmission, also reducing performance in the WLAN.